Local youth councils join EPAS at USP College for charity walk along Thames
- Jayden O'Brien
- Jun 22
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 2
On Saturday, the 21st of June, I and two other European Parliament Junior Ambassadors at Unified Seevic Palmer's College joined members of Thurrock Youth Cabinet, Southend Youth Council and the local charity Kinetika T100 for a sunny charity walk along the River Thames.
The walk (which was fittingly entitled the Forts to Thoughts Walk) was organised behind the scenes by myself and other members of Thurrock Youth Cabinet, which I joined in 2024 to campaign for people with non-visible disabilities as someone who has had on-and-off experience of CFS; chronic fatigue syndrome (or, as it is more properly called, myalgic encephalomyelitis - though that is quite a mouthful).
A few months after joining the youth cabinet, me and my colleagues started to explore a potential partnership with Kinetika T100, a local charity active in the Thurrock region, to organise a walk in the summer of 2025 to raise money for charitable causes in our borough of Thurrock and beyond.
Several discussions were held into the New Year, and in late January the partnership was finalised with seven members of the Youth Cabinet - myself, Daniel, Maria, Mia, Mollie and George, who is Member of Youth Parliament (MYP) for Thurrock - being appointed T100 Young Ambassadors by Kinetika to organise and manage the walk.
Planning the walk
We started our work in January, when we identified a route for the walk. As we looked into potential locations, we took into account several factors, such as shelter should it rain and how walkable it would be without disruption, for example from cars and other members of the public, while also making sure it would be low-intensity, so as to ensure that it would be as accessible for as many people as possible. We eventually settled with a route that would take us 3.2 miles straight down the rural and industrial riverfront of the Thames, starting at Coalhouse Fort in the small village of East Tilbury and ending at Tilbury Fort on the outskirts of Tilbury Town to the west.
Later, in February, all seven of us attended a "recce" (test) walk of the route to help us as we planned out the real deal, which we scheduled for May. On this recce walk, we catalogued and scoped out several points of interest and landmarks along the route, including (but not limited to) armaments left over from the Second World War, the forts themselves, the Beach of Dreams, the Shadow of War graffiti memorial and, perhaps the most controversial of them all, the starting construction works of the Lower Thames Crossing, which had been greenlit by the Government just days before.
After the recce walk, we delegated specific tasks and responsibilities to each member of the team, who would also be expected to read a speech to the attendees of our walk at each site of interest. As a local historian, I was tasked with researching the history of these sites of interest and writing a speech on the history behind Tilbury Fort in particular, which is well known across England for the famous speech by Queen Elizabeth I in 1588 where she rallied our nation's troops against the invading Spanish Armada, uttering the now famous words:
I know I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field!
In March, we expanded our partnership to involve the EPAS Programme at Unified Seevic Palmer's College in Little Thurrock, Grays, where I serve as the Lead European Parliament Junior Ambassador. It was through this link that we also secured the support and advisory involvement of Southend Youth Council, which has been partnered with EPAS at USP College since 2024, with my deputy Sebastian Rapley Mende, who is the elected Environment Officer at Southend Youth Council, also getting involved with the walk.
As the walk approached in May, we started a wide-ranging advertising campaign to promote the walk and get people to sign up to it. Posters were designed by Youth Cabinet members, USP College students and Kinetika T100 volunteers. We also contacted the local media to promote the walk, with the Thurrock Tribune writing a piece on the planned walk in its April edition.
And so, with the date scheduled for Tuesday, the 27th of May, we made our final preparations.
Or so we thought...
It turns out that Mother Nature felt needlessly cruel and decided to throw down a gauntlet of merciless, heavy rain and thunder storms around the time of the walk, which meant we had no choice but to delay it so as to avoid disruption and safeguarding violations.
After some days of emergency crisis talks, it was agreed that the walk would now be held just under a month later, on Saturday, the 21st of June. Sunday, the 22nd of June, and Sunday, the 6th of July, were also considered for the new date, but the 21st was chosen as the best date (weather permitting!) with the least timetable clashes and a higher expected turnout from the wider public according to Thurrock Council calculations.
The delay was unfortunate, but there was a silver lining to all this, in that the delayed date now meant we had more time to advertise and promote our walk and add some finishing touches to our plans. Over the next month, we bought some props for our speeches, with George buying a mask of Elizabeth (he naturally volunteered to re-enact her speech at Tilbury Fort) while other props were made from scratch. Most notably, Youth Cabinet members worked with artists from T100 to create a flag for the walk, which we would proudly fly as we trekked along the Thames.
The walk is held
Finally, after months of planning and preparation, the walk went ahead as scheduled on Saturday, the 21st of June, to much fan-fair from the local community in Thurrock, with around 20 to 30 people attending the walk at different times of the day, a very high turnout that exceeded expectations! This number does not include members of the Youth Cabinet, T100, EPAS at USP College or Southend Youth Council, which each sent groups to join us on the walk alongside our core team of seven who organised it.
EPAS at USP College sent three representatives to the walk (myself included, in a dual role as one of the walk's co-organisers). In addition to myself, I was joined by Sebastian Rapley Mende, my deputy at USP College Seevic Campus in Benfleet, and Erdem Gultekin, my deputy at USP College Palmer's Campus in Grays. Other members of Southend Youth Council and Thurrock Youth Cabinet also came along on the walk, helping to raise money for charitable causes in Thurrock and beyond.
The walk began as planned at Coalhouse Fort, albeit around half-an-hour later than was scheduled due to some (typical!) train disruption and delays on the c2c. It was unexpectedly hot on the day due to an ongoing heatwave - even by summer's standards - so free sun screen, water, white t-shirts and baseball caps were handed out to attendees to ensure everyone stayed hydrated and safe from the heat.
Naturally, the British weather was very volatile throughout the day, staying scorching hot and sunny until around 2 hours in, when it suddenly started to pour down of rain, as if the climate got dropped on its head. Luckily, we were just finishing up the walk by this time, so not much harm was done.
The first part of the walk after Coalhouse Fort was dominated by the overgrown, bushy path which characterised the first 20 or so minutes of our route. After a while, this mini-jungle of overgrown bushes eventually gave way to more open - albeit fenced off - fields to our right, mainly populated by horses, and the rocky riverfront to our left, with remarkable reflections glittering from the stones and pebbles and away into the sunlight as we made our way past the Beach of Dreams.
We also passed the war armaments before moving further, eventually making our way to the construction site of the new Lower Thames Crossing, which more or less looked the same as it did on our last visit. A little while after that, the rural character of the path gradually morphed with more industrial elements as we got closer to the industrial heartland of Tilbury Town and eventually came across the wall that bore the Shadow of War graffiti memorial, most of it unfortunately tagged over since we last saw it in February.
About an hour-and-a-half into our walk, we decided to take a quick pitstop under one of the many industrial works and docks on Tilbury Town's outskirts, where we also encountered by chance MS Norsky, which was passing through. We took the opportunity here to spend a 15 minute break replenishing our water stores and discussing and sharing our experiences of the walk so far.
After our break, we departed and headed on to Tilbury Fort, stopping by at the Thurrock sewage works on the way where we made a note of the smell and the historical, literal meaning of the name "Thurrock" in Old English, that being a "dung heap in a field". The Kentish town of Gravesend, which sits on the other side of the Thames, also emerged on the horizon as the Thames narrowed.
As we approached Tilbury Fort, the industrial character of the area this side of the Thames cleared somewhat and made way for more fields and horses, though Tilbury Town and its industry still beckoned far off in the background. Ironically, some horses saw it fit to leave their own natural "dung heaps" on our path, meaning we had to watch our steps as we got closer to the fort.
We finally got to the fort not long after, though it did start to pour of rain, meaning that we had to rap things up a lot quicker than anticipated. I delivered my speech detailing the history of Tilbury Fort from its construction as a device fort in the 16th century to its continued survival as a tourist attraction today, where it is reputed as one of the best surviving examples of 18th century architecture by historians. It also houses the only surviving gunpowder magazines from the early 18th century in the entirety of Britain.
After that, we thanked everyone for attending our walk and asked them to consider what thoughts they took from the walk. What, for example, will the route look like in 10, 20, 50 years from now? Will it remain more or less the same, or will something different, something new, stand in its place?
After all, with local issues like the Lower Thames Crossing and the Greenbelt and national issues like climate change and threats of war, who's to say where we'll be by then?
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